Overall seems like a pretty good result. Disappointing that the heritage buildings will still be protected, but sounds like that was rejected on technicalities rather than due to any desire to retain those buildings.
Looks like they may be doing just that: Police treat painting over of Auckland's K' Road rainbow crossing as hate crime
From the NZIA About the awards programme (which took me a bit to find):
The awards judges assess each project in terms of the following:
The relationship of the building to its site, context and presence
The degree of consistency and completeness in expressing the relationship between concept, form and structure
Light, colour, texture and spatial qualities
Structure, construction, materials and issues of durability and detail
Environmental performance
User satisfaction, value to the client and acceptability of solutions to the brief
Contribution to the advancement of architecture as a discipline and the enhancement of the human spirit
It seems like there's a panel of jurors that visit the sites as well as meeting with the architects and clients
Some other sources:
I know, been kinda conditioned to expect the worst but yeah this seems like great progress. Still has to go through Chris Bishop but from what I understand he's not likely to oppose this stuff.
All completely unrelated but interesting, to me at least, nonetheless.
There's been a few notable gas leaks recently - the other day a street in Petone was closed, and I seem to recall there was an evacuation of some sort somewhere a day or so prior to that.
Yeah I'm not quite sure why it's being done this way - which makes me suspicious. On the surface it seems to me like this is in effect an interest-free loan of $32M with the condition that Reading fix up the site and make it into something viable once more.
I guess the gotcha is that it would be an upfront cost for the WCC which is already having to make big cuts. You could also argue about the optics of having to pay Reading to actually do something with the site, and not just leave it derelict as they have done for the last several years.
But if this pans out, and helps reverse the decline of Courtney Place, then sounds like an okay plan.
Something to check out this weekend if you've got little ones (though Sunday's forecast looks a bit wet)
I couldn't find a list of what ground leases the council currently has, but it looks like they typically are things like sports clubrooms, community halls, hobby groups etc:
Examples: Proposed new leases and licence on recreation reserve and Wellington Town Belt Land, outlines proposals to establish leases to Capital BMX Club Incorporated, Wellington Beekeepers Association Incorporated, and Port Nicholson & Poneke Cycling Club Incorporated
These are all leased extremely cheaply ($1 per year for 100m² for the Beekeepers club as an example) presumably because they are community focused and non-commercial.
I'd be worried that this option would amount to selling off community spaces to commercial developers (though it could be that the council has other leases that are already commercially developed that it's simply seeking to sell off to the existing tenants)
I flew domestic from Wellington this morning and was still required to take out laptops - though this was Jetstar.